This newest book of poetry by Michael McClure (longtime CCA faculty member and 2005 recipient of CCA's honorary doctorate of fine arts) speaks of working toward freedom and beauty during a time of interminable war and the destruction of our natural surroundings. Included in this new collection is: a long travel poem to an Indian forest where an enraged elephant charges then recognizes an old human friend and turns back into the trees; "Double Moire," which "reads like a fulfillment of Goethe's prophesy and Shelley's: the whole universe seems to be in it, down to the smallest and up to the most vast. It is absolutely what the ultimate nature poem might be" (Jerome Rothenberg). "Dear Being," a garland of 37 stanzas, uses the freedoms of Buddhist hwa yen.

MFA Program in Writing faculty member Gloria Frym's new chapbook, Any Time Soon (Little Red Leaves, 2010) was just released this week as part of issue 5 of Little Red Leaves (LRL), which is a collectively edited annual online journal of poetry as well as an ebook/paperback series of original chapbooks and reprints.

Congratulations to CCA alumna Robin Powlesland (MFA Writing 2005), who was recently named a finalist in the 2010 Omnidawn Chapbook Poetry contest, a prestigious small-press award, for her work verbs without a past. Powlesland currently resides in Taos, New Mexico, and is an adjunct faculty member at the University of New Mexico–Taos.

The five Omnidawn finalists (listed below in alphabetical order) were selected by Elizabeth Robinson:

In "12 Hours in Barcelona" Writing & Literature professor Marianne Rogoff has a dusk-till-dawn layover in the city of Gaudi. She leaves her bags in an airport locker, buses to the center of town, and finds herself one among many on a festival occasion, out "on a night when free ballets and symphonies and theatrical performances are taking place all over town, lending a glow, heightening our pleasure, focusing the eye out of the chaos of so-much-to-see into the framework of the arts: dance, music, language. Over there, young spoken-word poets are rapping hip-hop beats; here, it's Shakespeare in Spanish; now, a celebratory speech; in my ear, the stories of Barcelona's past and future. I see it all from my perch atop this slow-moving red bus."

MFA Program in Writing second-year student Alka Joshi is heading off to Florida in October for a three-week artists residency (Comic Book Workshop / Graphic Novels Residency) at the Atlantic Center for the Arts (ACA) with Russian master artist and seasoned graphic novelist Svetlana Chmakova (Dramacon, 2007, and Nightschool, 2006), who also drew and wrote a monthly serialized manga strip (aka comic strip) for CosmoGirl and has recently finished

California College of the Arts saw countless events and happenings during 2009, yet one event in particular stands out for its remarkable success: An Evening with David Sedaris. CCA's benefit for scholarships, which attracted more than 2,000 attendees to the Marin Center Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium on Thursday, October 29, raised more than $150,000 for students in need—a whopping 50 percent above the goal!

In 2010, students at California College of the Arts (CCA) will design furniture for Lighthouse Community Charter School, Oakland; help improve communications and systems for seniors at Bethany Center, San Francisco; create protective nesting modules for seabirds on Año Nuevo Island, off the Northern California coast; and work with high school students to publish an anthology of personal essays at 826 Valencia Book Project, San Francisco. These and several other projects are part of ENGAGE at CCA, an innovative initiative that will launch January 11, 2010.